Azeb Madebo

The first National Communication Association (NCA) Undergraduate Honors Conference will take place at American University in Washington D.C. on May 16 to 19. UW undergraduates Samra Mengistu and Azeb Madebo are among the 40 students who will be attending, as the conference is designed to “assist rising seniors majoring in communication in preparing for their capstone projects and post graduation plans.”

Both students found out about the opportunity through Professor Ralina Joseph. They took Black Cultural Studies during winter quarter and developed their research ideas from that course.

Samra Mengistu

Mengistu taught black history every Wednesday morning at Thurgood Marshall Elementary in South Seattle for the service learning aspect of the class, where she began to n

otice how race operated within the school and the differences between the Accelerated Progress Program (APP) classes and general education.

“The neighborhood kids who are predominantly black living in the area are in the general education program,” she said. “The kids in APP are almost 100 percent white and you can tell what kind of class it is just by walking down the hallway and peeking into the classroom. It’s kind of segregation within the school in 2013, so that was really interesting.”

Mengistu attended American University for two and a half years before transferring to the UW and said it will be nice to go back to visit.

“I want to make more contacts with the communication field and get more direction about what I want to do after I graduate,” she said, “whether that be graduate school or getting a job. I would like to work a couple years before grad school, so it just seemed like a really cool opportunity to meet people.”

Madebo’s research paper is titled, “Subversive Black Cultural Production Concealed within Blackface Minstrelsy,” and covers Richards and Pringle’s Famous Georgia Minstrels and the minstrel show from the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM). She will be adding to the research before the conference by looking into audience readings of texts by scholars like Stuart Hall.

“The conference offers a great opportunity to showcase my work, learn from fellow communication undergrads, and network nationwide for graduate programs and mentorship,” Madebo said. “I think it’s cool that as an undergraduate, I can travel to research conferences with the support of the UW Communication Department.”

Madebo added that she is hoping to feel inspired, motivated, and capable of pursuing her academic endeavors after the conference. Both students will be studying abroad in Barbados this summer, where they will continue to study the role of race in a community.

Join us as we celebrate 10 years of the Native Voices program at UW. Most of our graduates are returning to help celebrate our anniversary.

Friday, May 3rd, 7-10 pm, with a reception at 6pm. University of Washington campus, Kane Hall 220.

Assistant Professor Katy Pearce is giving a talk titled “Networked Authoritarianism in Azerbaijan: How the Azerbaijani government uses the Internet to deter dissent” on May 2 at 7 p.m. in HUB 214. Pearce holds affiliation with the Ellison Center for Russian East European, and Central Asian Studies and specializes in technology and media use in the Former Soviet Union. Her research focuses on social and political uses of technologies and digital content in the transitioning democracies and semi-authoritarian states of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, but primarily Armenia and Azerbaijan. This talk will cover the increased importance of online political life in Azerbaijan and the role of social media.

For more information about the talk, visit the Ellison Center website. It will also be livestreamed here.

Almeera Anwar (L) and KC Cowen (R) with Department Chair David Domke. Photo by Victoria Sprang.

Over a dozen Communication students joined recent grads KC Cowen (B.A., 2008) and Almeera Anwar (B.A., 2012) for a career chat over lunch. Cowen and Anwar met through the Association for Women in Communications (AWC) during their days as students and now both work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They landed their jobs through a temp agency, sharing with the students that this is an excellent avenue in an increasingly competitive job market. Each student walked away with a copy of an article recently posted on the UW Professional and Continuing Education site about how temporary or contract work functions.

Both Cowen and Anwar gave a straight talk about working for such an internationally recognized organization. At the beginning of each day, said Anwar, “it’s just a job” with all of the day-to-day tasks any job requires. She arrives at her cubicle, checks her email, gets a cup of coffee, goes back to her email, creates spreadsheets or communication pieces, or any number of tasks that she needs to do to help the people she works for do what they need to do, to help the people in the field do what they need to do in order to deliver the vaccines.

Not all nonprofits are the same. The Gates Foundation employees get a laptop and a smartphone – a great perk, but one that comes with the responsibility of being available to respond quickly and sometimes after regular work hours. The pace is fast at their job and they both love what they do. They stressed to the students to not assume that their first job out of college has to be a bad job. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” quoted Anwar.

“Being a soon-to-be graduate of the Communication department with a strong interest in global health, meeting with KC and Almeera was a huge benefit,” one student said. “What they do is right up my alley, and I was so happy to speak with them afterward. Because of the meeting, I now have an opportunity of speaking again with them in the near future.”

Another student said, “I learned many lessons and got several tips of how to behave in a professional manner. I just wished the meeting was longer, but I had to leave early to go to my next class.”

The career chat is part of our Communication Works! series, offering professional development events throughout the academic year.

About the mentors:

KC Cowen was recently promoted to Senior Assistant on the Global Health Financial Planning and Analysis Team. She is responsible for providing high-level support to the Global Health Program Chief Financial Officer. She previously worked as a Program Assistant on the Global Health HIV Team, responsible for team-wide coordination, event planning and relationship management with grantees and partners. Before the Gates Foundation, she was employed at the Medina Foundation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and the University of Washington Office of Development and Alumni Relations. Cowen is a proud 2008 alumni of the University of Washington and owes her professional success to the connections and skills she developed as a student in the Department of Communication. She continues to give back by mentoring current Department of Communication students. In her free time, she enjoys walking Green Lake with her new husband Brian.

Almeera Anwar is a Program Assistant on Vaccine Delivery. While in college, she participated in the Dream Project, First Year Programs, Association for Women in Communications, Residence Hall Student Association, Associated Student, UW Leaders, and Relay for Life. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism & Anthropology. She did a Study Abroad in Switzerland, which was an intensive study on “Making Place: Tourism, Culture and Global Communication.” She considers herself an advocate for women and girls, education and cancer research. In her spare time she enjoys digging into a good book, trying out a recipe or exploring a new glass of wine with friends.

It sounds controversial, right? Well that’s kind of the point. The UW Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) program announced the official launch of Let’s Have Dinner and Talk about Death, “a project created to foster proactive and constructive conversations about end-of-life decisions,” bringing to the forefront a topic that is not frequently talked about.

The discussion takes place around an actual dinner table, while students and healthcare professionals eat an organic meal, sip on wine, and one more thing…talk about human life and death. The idea began with Michael Hebb, inaugural MCDM Teaching Fellow, and MCDM Associate Director Scott Macklin in their effort to “rethink the role the internet plays in embodied human experience.”

With only 25 percent of Americans dying at home when 70 percent say they would prefer to, and more than half of Medicare dollars being spent on the last two months of patients’ lives, Hebb said, “It is clear that sharing our preferences for what we’d like at the end of our life is the more important – and costly – conversation that Americans are not having.”

Check out their website (a full interactive version is being launched in the summer of 2013) and follow them on Twitter @deathoverdinner to stay updated on future developments. It has also just been announced that Hebb will speak about the program at TEDMED 2013 on April 18 in Washington, D.C.

Professor Joseph’s new book “Transcending Blackness”

Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large featured UW Communication Professor Ralina Joseph’s new book “Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial.” Discussing what he learned over coffee with Joseph, Large talks about what it means to be mixed race and how the racial world has gotten to where it is today.

Read the full column here>>

Jillian Stampher (bottom row, second from right) with the other 2013 Olympia Program interns.

As the 4th annual Spring Fundraiser quickly approaches, we wanted to share a few stories about how the money raised at past auctions has helped students and their endeavors:

The Olympia Legislative Reporting Internship Program gives practical training to students interested in political reporting, while contributing to local news organizations. Past participants have gone on to write for daily publications including the Seattle P-I and the Tacoma News-Tribune.

Junior, journalism student Jillian Stampher decided to join after being approached by program coordinator Mike Henderson. She has been the news editor at The Daily for the past three quarters and hadn’t done much political reporting, so she determined to give it a shot.

“It’s definitely helped me branch out a lot because it’s put me in a situation where I wasn’t necessarily comfortable,” she said, “and it helped me be independent since I was working on my own down there, opposed to with a newspaper like some of the other students. And it’s definitely nice to have that variety in what I’ve been covering.”

Stampher is writing stories mostly focusing in higher education for The Daily, while other students in the program this quarter are contributing to the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association (WNPA), the Washington State Public Affairs Network (TVW), Northwest Public Radio, McClatchy Newspapers, The Seattle Times, and Crosscut.com.

“It’s nice going down there and I can talk to Andrew Garber from The Seattle Times or anybody from these other newspapers that are used to UW students being down there and they can offer me advice,” Stampher said.

And the number one benefit of the program according to Stampher: hands-on reporting.

Register for the Spring Fundraiser here >>

The book cover photo is courtesy of barnesandnoble.com

Alumnus Bob McChesney (B.A., 1986 and Ph.D., 1989), who was also inducted into the UW Communication Hall of Fame in 2010, has a new book out that is receiving national attention from scholars, tech-savvy individuals, and anyone concerned with the Internet.

Author of True Wealth Juliet Schor wrote, “A major new work by one of the nation’s leading analysts of media… A hard to put down, meticulously researched must-read.”

The book is titled “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Away from Democracy.” McChesney described it as a “political economic examination of the digital revolution based upon 15 years of research” and the capstone of his career.

Written with the aim of helping scholars and citizens be informed participants of the potential of the digital revolution, editor of The Progressive Matthew Rothschild wrote, “With a panoramic sweep and profound insights, McChesney rings the alarm bells, showing clearly how capitalism is swallowing up the promise of the Internet. No one knows this field better than McChesney, and with this book, he has reached the pinnacle.”

“Digital Disconnect” is available at Powell’s Books or on Amazon.

5-6:30 p.m.
CMU 126
RSVP: vsprang@uw.edu

Companies look at your individual experiences as only one part of the whole package. Are you sharing the right information? Join to define your personal brand identity and how you can use it to your advantage to land your dream job.

Speakers

Mikaela Gomes (ʼ10) is a Medical Recruiter at NuWest Group, LLC MedTemps, a locally owned and operated staffing firm in Bellevue, WA specializing in clinical and administrative placements in the healthcare field within the Puget Sound Region.

Stacey Engle (BA, 2008)
Stacey is the Director of Marketing at Fierce Inc., a global leadership development and training company. She works collaboratively across all business functions to develop and implement a multi-tiered global marketing strategy for Fierce and Fierce programs. Her professional background includes nonprofit and corporate work including public relations, B2B and B2C marketing and communication as well as leadership development and professional training.

Megan Szerwo (BA, 2004)
Born in Seattle, Megan Coppersmith Szerwo has grown up exploring and loving this city. A longtime bureaucrat, Megan started her work career while studying Communications at UW, with an internship with King Countyʼs Department of Natural Resources and Parks. Since that time, Megan has worked with the media and the public, marketing programs and services for King County Elections, King Countyʼs Department of Executive Services and now the Seattle City Council, since March 2010.